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Illinois Football: The Sky Is the Limit for Ke'Shawn Vaughn
I am as excited about the Illinois football season as any fan right now.
The team should be pretty good this year because they have a lot of experience returning from the 2015 campaign.
Running back Ke’Shawn Vaughn is one of those talented players that is back and better than ever.
Vaughn rushed for 723 yards and 6 touchdowns on just 157 carries last season. This came out to be an average of 4.6 yards per carry.
Now, that type of production is pretty good for a true freshman that was thrown into the starting spotlight early on.
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I expect those numbers to increase this season, though. With a new head coach like Lovie Smith, Vaughn is bound to get more touches.
Looking back at Lovie’s NFL head coaching experience you can see what his tendencies are. He likes to play hard-nosed defense and run the ball.
These are Lovie’s two bread and butter.
Illinois actually had a pretty good defense already. They had the talent on the field and now they have the coaching to guide that talent.
The other half of the equation is the running game.
Vaughn is going to be the workhorse this season. He will be called upon to run the ball and get meaningful yards.
But, we are all expecting more carries and with Lovie that should come to fruition.
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With the Chicago Bears and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Lovie ran the ball a lot. He has 11 combined years as a head coach in the NFL and each season, except one due to injury, the running back saw an average of 276.6 carries per season.
Now, the NFL has 16 games in a season so those 276.6 carries were divided by 16 to get an average of 17.2875 carries per contest.
So, if you just took the 17.2875 carriers per game that the NFL running backs averaged under Lovie and applied it to Vaughn’s 2015 season then he would have had 954.27 yards rushing.
This would have been eighth in the Big Ten in rushing as a true freshman.
I expect more from Vaughn this season, though. If he can average 5.38 yards per carry, which was the average for the top ten running backs in the Big Ten last season, then he would rush for 1,113 yards.
This would have been fourth in the Big Ten in 2015.
My expectations for Vaughn this season are for him to carry the ball around 200 times and average 5.38 yards per carry.
If Vaughn can pull those numbers off then he would be a top-five running back in the Big Ten.
I think the sky is the limit for this talented young running back. Vaughn is going to show the Big Ten what power running is all about.
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